Judgment Day For the Olympic Cities

Making sense of the process of picking the city to host the quadrennial Olympic Games is not easy. Think of it as a sort of papal consistory on steroids. Like cardinals sequestered to vote for a new pope, the 122 members of the International Olympic Committee will lock themselves into a conference room in the World Trade Center in Moscow on July 13 and not leave until white smoke rises to proclaim a winner from among five candidate cities: Beijing, Istanbul, Osaka, Paris and Toronto. While the voting takes only a day, cities campaign for years to be selected. After all,...